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Paul-Feyerabend-Against-Method.Pdf Against Method Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge Paul Feyerabend 1993 (third edition) Contents Preface 4 Preface to the Third Edition 6 Introduction to the Chinese Edition 10 Analytical Index 13 Introduction 16 1 20 2 24 3 27 4 33 5 37 6 48 7 56 8 65 9 71 10 83 11 85 12 97 13 99 14 106 15 110 Appendix 1 118 2 16 122 Appendix 2 152 17 155 18 167 19 172 20 182 Postscript on Relativism 193 3 Preface In 1970 Imre Lakatos, one of the best friends I ever had, cornered me at a party. “Paul,” he said, “you have such strange ideas. Why don’t you write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing and I promise you - we shall have lots of fun.” I liked the suggestion and started working. The manuscript of my part of the book was finished in 1972 and I sentitto London. There it disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances. Imre Lakatos, wholoved dramatic gestures, notified Interpol and, indeed, Interpol found my manuscript and returned it to me. I reread it and made some final changes. In February 1974, only a few weeks afterI had finished my revision, I was informed of Imre’s death. I published my part of ourcommon enterprise without his response. A year later I published a second volume, Science in a Free Society, containing additional material and replies to criticism. This history explains the form of the book. It is not a systematic treatise; it is a letter toafriend and addresses his idiosyncrasies. For example, Imre Lakatos was a rationalist, hence rationalism plays a large role in the book. He also admired Popper and therefore Popper occurs much more frequently than his “objective importance” would warrant. Imre Lakatos, somewhat jokingly, called me an anarchist and I had no objection to putting on the anarchist’s mask. Finally, Imre Lakatos loved to embarrass serious opponents with jokes and irony and so I, too, occasionally wrote in a rather ironical vein. An example is the end of Chapter 1: “anything goes” is not a “principle” I hold - I do not think that “principles” can be used and fruitfully discussed outside the concrete research situation they are supposed to affect - but the terrified exclamation ofa rationalist who takes a closer look at history. Reading the many thorough, serious, longwinded and thoroughly misguided criticisms I received after publication of the first English edition I often recalled my exchanges with Imre; how we would both have laughed had we beenableto read these effusions together. The new edition merges parts of Against Method with excerpts from Science in a Free Society.I have omitted material no longer of interest, added a chapter on the trial of Galileo and achapter on the notion of reality that seems to be required by the fact that knowledge is part of a complex historical process, eliminated mistakes, shortened the argument wherever possible and freed it from some of its earlier idiosyncrasies. Again I want to make two points: first, that science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and, secondly, that non-scientific cultures, procedures and as- sumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so, if this is the wish of their representatives. Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially demo- cratic societies, must be protected from science. This does not mean that scientists cannot profit from a philosophical education and that humanity has not and never will profit from the sciences. However, the profits should not be imposed; they should be examined and freely accepted bythe parties of the exchange. In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and sug- gestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should 4 be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality. There is nothing in the nature of science that excludes such institutional arrangements or shows that they are liable to lead to disaster. None of the ideas that underlie my argument is new. My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of “critical” rationalism. Lakatos was, after Kuhn, one of the few thinkers who noticed the discrepancy and tried to eliminate it by means of a complex and very interesting theory of rationality. I don’t think he has succeeded in this. But the attempt was worth the effort; it has led to interesting results in the history of science and to new insightsinto the limits of reason. I therefore dedicate also this second, already much more lonely version of our common work to his memory. Earlier material relating to the problems in this book is now collected in my Philosophical Papers.1 Farewell to Reason2 contains historical material, especially from the early history of ra- tionalism in the West and applications to the problems of today. Berkley, September 1987 1 {Preface, 1} 2 vols, Cambridge, 1981. 2 {Preface, 2} London, 1987. 5 Preface to the Third Edition Many things have happened since I first published Against Method (AM for short). There have been dramatic political, social and ecological changes. Freedom has increased - but it has brought hunger, insecurity, nationalistic tensions, wars and straightforward murder. World leaders have met to deal with the deterioration of our resources; as is their habit, they have made speeches and signed agreements. The agreements are far from satisfactory; some of them are a sham. However, at least verbally, the environment has become a world-wide concern. Physicians, developmental agents, priests working with the poor and disadvantaged have realized that these people know more about their condition than a belief in the universal excellence of science or organized re- ligion had assumed and they have changed their actions and their ideas accordingly (liberation theology; primary environmental care, etc.). Many intellectuals have adapted what they have learned at universities and special schools to make their knowledge more efficient and more humane. On a more academic level historians (of science, of culture) have started approaching the past in its own terms. Already in 1933, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Lucien Feb- vre had ridiculed writers who, “sitting at their desks, behind mountains of paper, having closed and covered their windows”, made profound judgements about the life of landholders, peasants and farmhands. In a narrow field historians of science tried to reconstruct the distant andthe more immediate past without distorting it by modern beliefs about truth (fact) and rationality. Philosophers then concluded that the various forms of rationalism that had offered their services had not only produced chimaeras but would have damaged the sciences had they been adopted as guides. Here Kuhn’s masterpiece played a decisive role.1 It led to new ideas. Unfortunately it also encouraged lots of trash. Kuhn’s main terms (“paradigm”, “revolution”, “normal science”, “prescience”, “anomaly”, “puzzle-solving”, etc.) turned up in various forms of pseudoscience while his general approach confused many writers: finding that science had been freed from the fetters of a dogmatic logic and epistemology they tried to tie it down again, this time with sociological ropes. That trend lasted well into the early seventies. By contrast there are now historians and sociologists who concentrate on particulars and allow generalities only to the extent that they are supported by sociohistorical connections. “Nature”, says Bruno Latour, referring to “science in the making” is “the consequence of [a] settlement” of “controversies”.2 Or, as I wrote in the first edition of AM: “Creation ofa thing, and creation plus full understanding of a correct idea of the thing, are very often parts of one and the same indivisible process and cannot be separated without bringing the process to a stop.”3 Examples of the new approach are Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks, Peter Galison, How Experiments End, Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy, Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game 1 {Preface to the Third Edition, 1} The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962. 2 {Preface to the Third Edition, 2} Science in Action, Milton Keynes, 1987, pp. 4 and 98f. 3 {Preface to the Third Edition, 3} London, 1975, p. 26, repeated on p. 17 of the present edition - original emphasis. 6 and others.4 There are studies of the various traditions (religious, stylistic, patronage, etc.) thatin- fluenced scientists and shaped their research;5 they show the need for a far more complex account of scientific knowledge than that which had emerged from positivism and similar philosophies. On a more general level we have the older work of Michal Polanyi and then Putnam, van Fraassen, Cartwright, Marcello Pera6 and, yes, Imre Lakatos, who was sufficiently optimistic to believe that history herself - a lady he took very seriously - offered simple rules of theory evaluation. In sociology the attention to detail has led to a situation where the problem is no longer why and how “science” changes but how it keeps together. Philosophers, philosophers of biology especially, suspected for some time that there is not one entity “science” with clearly defined principles but that science contains a great variety of (high-level theoretical, phenomenological, experimental) approaches and that even a particular science such as physics is but a scattered collection of subjects (elasticity, hydrodynamics, rheology, thermodynamics, etc., etc.) each one containing contrary tendencies (example: Prandtl vs Helmholtz, Kelvin, Lamb, Rayleigh; Trues- dell vs Prandtl; Birkhoff vs “physical commonsense”; Kinsman illustrating all trends - in hydro- dynamics).
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